Sulfonamides from N-Tosylhydrazones in One Step

Since the discovery of the sulfa antibiotics in the 1930s, the sulfonamide motif has been a prevalent pharmacophore found in many medicines and drug candidates. While traditional syntheses of sulfonamides are straightforward from sulfonyl chlorides and amines, several steps are generally required to prepare the necessary sulfonyl chloride. To address the limitations from these early methodologies, recent work from Pfizer and other groups led to the development of convenient one-pot methods to obtain sulfonamides starting from a large pool of readily available reactants such as (hetero)aryl/alkyl halides or (hetero)arylboronic acids and amines. Dr. Andy Tsai and his co-workers at Pfizer Worldwide Medicinal Chemistry (Groton, USA) sought to develop novel methods for accessing alkyl sulfonamides from other commonly encountered starting materials.